Guide me, Mama

I told Biyi to meet me in the Munchies restaurant at Ilupeju. He said that there was something uneasy about the way I sounded, but I insisted nothing was wrong. It was a lie. Something strange had happened.

My heart was leaping in naked anxiety, I didn’t know how to tell him what just happened to me—if I was even meant to tell him at all. But I needed to talk to someone, and that someone had to be Biyi.

As I sat in Munchies waiting for him, I remembered how we met. I had gotten a debit alert from my bank without making any transaction. Infuriated, I stormed into the bank ready to vomit fire. But there were so many people, and If they didn’t rectify the mess in the shortest time possible, my family and I would starve that weekend.

When I counted the heads ahead of me on the queue, the venom in me condensed into tears of defeat, but the distressful thought of hunger glued my feet to the marble floor of the bank.

That was when our eyes met. He was attending to customers on the queue I was in, when saw me. He told a security guard to bring me to him and asked what the problem was. I narrated my plight and he strapped it around his head, running around like a man with werepe in his pants seeking ways to help me. He offered to give me money if it wasn’t resolved immediately. I declined the offer, but he insisted.

That was ten months ago. Now, he was seated in front of me, his eyes scrutinising mine.

“When did you get here,” I asked.

“Not long ago. It was beautiful to watch you roaming in your head,” he

said.

There was a certain kind of gentle eagerness with which he usually spoke, so that every word he uttered felt like a thoughtful gift. I really liked that about him, and I envied it too.

“I try not to get lost in it,” I looked at his head briefly, and wondered what kind of things were locked up in it.

“Have you been able to get your father’s drugs?” he asked.

My father got diagnosed with prostate cancer about a year after my mother died. We sold all we could, including the mattress my younger sisters and I slept on, to afford his medication. However, we ran out of valuable things to sell, so my sisters and I dropped out of school to work on our uncle’s farm. We would then hawk the fruits and vegetables we harvested. But what we made was barely enough to buy Father’s medication and feed my sisters, and his health kept deteriorating as days piled up into unending weeks.

“No, I haven’t, and I won’t be able to, except by some strange universal calculus.”

“I’m saving all I can so we can afford surgery.”

“Biyi, it’s not like you earn much and you’ve done enough already.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“But I am. I’m grateful that you’re ready to help but I can’t keep taking money from you. I just hope that one day, I can pay you back for how good you’ve been.”

We were quiet for a while as my words marinated with the breeze that loomed around us.

“So, why did you want to meet up?” He asked.

I suddenly remembered why I had called him and became anxious all over again—the kind of anxiety that rapes one’s peace of mind so intensely that the concept of peace is forever corrupted.

“Biyi, I had a dream last night. I saw my mum…she came to me and…I didn’t want her to go, but she said she had to and gave me a little black book and said, ‘let this lead you, my child’. Then I woke up and found the book beside me,” I said, bringing out the book from my bag.

“Are you serious? Because I’m waiting for the part where you tell me it’s a joke and we can both laugh.”

“Biyi, I’m not joking,”

“Well, maybe you bought the book and forgot you did.”

“Does this notebook look like something I can afford? I haven’t even bought a pencil in months.”

“There has to be a reasonable explanation,” he said.

“This is the only explanation there is…you know what, forget it,” I said, and stood up to leave.

He pulled me back, “I’m sorry…I’m just finding it difficult to grasp what you’re saying. Is there anything in the book?”

“Yes, I went through every page but only found these,” I said, handing him the book.

In it were these words written in Yoruba:

Omo mi, Gbogbo oun tó ńdán kọ́ ni wúrà. Ranti iyẹn nigbati o ba lọ si ibiti ẹlẹsẹ mẹta naa ti pade.

Meaning: My child, not all that glitters is gold. Remember that when you go to where three footpaths meet.

“Where does three footpaths meet?” He asked.

“My mother used to love reading Ola Rotimi’s The gods are not to blame. In the book, Ede is where three footpaths meet. That’s where she grew up. My grandmother’s house is in Ede. She wants me to go there.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, but I won’t find out by sitting down here. I’m going to Ede now.”

“Teni, this is crazy…this is really crazy, I hope you know?”

“I do. But my mother reached out to me, she gave me this book for a reason, and I won’t stop until I find out why.”

Biyi was combing my frame with his eyes. I could tell he was contemplating what to do.

“I’ll drive you to Ede.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. And let’s go now before I talk myself out of it.”

We drove from Lagos to Ede that afternoon without saying much to each other. Sometimes, it felt normal that we were on a journey because of a mysterious little black book. At other times, my mind was coloured with many shades of confusion.

Ede was rural in every sense of the word. The last time we visited Ede, my mother was alive. I remember her taking me to her Father’s fifty hectares cocoa farm and telling me stories of how he used to be the richest man in Osun state. He made his money by selling cocoa to white men who came to our continent for business.

“They paid him in hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said.

“Really?” I asked, “Where’s all that money now?”

“Polygamy was my father’s undoing,” she simply said.

My grandfather had fifteen wives, and he built houses for all of them. They didn’t live together. He also gave each of them portions of land on his farm, according to their seniority.

Most of my grandfather’s wives had at least eight children, so he didn’t even know all of his children. But my grandmother gave birth to only one child—my mother, and for that, she was considered barren.

As a child, I was thrilled that my grandfather had children almost the population of my entire primary school, but as I grew older, I became irritated by the reckless absurdity of it all.

“Are you sure this is your grandmother’s house?” Biyi asked, after he turned off the engine.

“Yes. I was here several times as a child,” I said. We stopped coming after she died many years back.

My grandmother’s house was a four-bedroom bungalow. The yellow paint on the walls had mostly peeled off. I was told that the house used to be one of the most elegant houses in Osun state in the seventies. But its glory had long faded.

“So, we’re here, what then?” Biyi asked when we got in.

He wasn’t done asking when my eyes caught the framed painting across what used to be the dining room.

“This is odd,” I said

“Everything about this trip is odd.”

“This painting was never here whenever I visited. I would remember

if it was.”

I removed the painting from the wall and behind it was a small key, and the words:

Mo ti fi ọpá naa le ọ lọwọ

Meaning: I have given you the baton.

“What Baton?” I asked.

“Can we go now? We’ll figure out the baton part later,” Biyi said.

This could not be all, I thought. Mother wouldn’t have led me here just to get another riddle. But if I didn’t know what the baton was, or what the key was for, we had to leave.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said, swallowing the taste of disappointment that had settled on my tongue.

“Wait,” Biyi said, “maybe the baton isn’t an actual baton, maybe it’s a metaphor for something your mother gave you.”

“Something my mother gave me?” I repeated it several times, while dissecting every bit of my time with her. And then it hit me.

“My grandmother’s land portion on my grandfather’s farm…there’s something they buried there,” I said. I could feel the excitement heighten in my bloodstream. Biyi was confused.

“When I was seven years old, my grandmother and my mother took me to my grandfather’s farm, and they buried something on their piece of land. When I asked my mother what they buried, she said it was just a stick…let’s go there now, the farm isn’t far away.”

All the portions that belonged to my grandfather’s wives were marked in

their names. I found my grandmother’s portion after walking for an hour that felt like decade.

“Where do we start digging from? Certainly not that part full of fieldstones. Whatever they buried had to be on this other side,” Biyi said, pointing to the part that didn’t have fieldstones.

Not all that glitters is gold, something whispered.

“Biyi, let’s start with where those fieldstones are,” I said, and he rolled his eyes at me.

We had just removed a few stones when Biyi started digging.

“There’s something here,” he said sounding surprised.

“Of course, there’s something here…I just need to know what it is.”

“No, I mean there’s something here,” he repeated.

“Oh, what is it?” I dropped the fieldstone I was holding and rushed to where he was.

It was a medium sized metal box. We brought it out and it was locked. Intuitively, I knew the key we had found in my grandma’s house would unlock it, and it did. When I saw what was inside, my heart palpitations began to rise and fall like a violent tsunami.

“Jesus! Teni, this is dollars!”

I couldn’t say a word. I was shaking. Biyi started counting the money. The more he counted, the more he shouted and the more he shouted, the closer I was to fainting.

“Its $20,000 fucking dollars! I mean not 20,000 naira, but twentyyy thoussaanddd fuckingggg DOLLAZZ!” he was screaming.

“How much is that in naira,” I asked?

He brought out his phone and calculated it and screamed even more.

“That’s 7.6 million naira!”

I started crying. My father only needed 2.2 million naira for his surgery. My sisters and I could go back to school. We wouldn’t need to hawk again. We wouldn’t need to go to bed hungry again. Life could be meaningful again. I went on my knees, and I just cried.

“I can’t believe this. God, please,” he said looking to the sky, “I want to start dreaming of the ghosts of my relatives that would lead me to this kind of money.”

I took my phone and dialled my sister’s number, as it rang, I touched the money and smelt it to be sure it was real.

“Hello, Teni, are you almost home? I was about calling you,” she said.

“No, but I’ll be home in a few hours. I just wanted to tell you that God heard our prayers…we won’t suffer again,” I said.

“What happened,” she asked?

“A miracle,” I answered.